"Yet, there is an additional, important argument that should be made in favor of adopting Windows Forms today. In three words that would be the smart client revolution.
Smart clients are much more that just a rich Windows user interface. I define a smart client application as a rich
user interface application that resides on the client in a secure manner, connected to a back-end server, and is deployed over http."

Why use HTTP? It's a limited protocol that has an elaborate mess of hacks built around it to make up for its statelessness. Of course, if you used a custom protocol, that would essentially be describing a client-server system... and that's just so '80s.